We performed a comparison between Check Point UTM-1 [EOL] and Netgate pfSense based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Netgate, Fortinet, OPNsense and others in Firewalls."It's great for capturing the traffic and troubleshooting it."
"The flexibility and ease of configuration are the most valuable features."
"Security, SD-WAN, and Streetscape are valuable features."
"One of the valuable features is a standardized OS."
"Its administrative panel is very intuitive and simple. It is simpler than the other solutions that we had. As an administrator, we are always looking for the easiest solution to manage network policies. We are able to filter everything on our network and also use the VPN feature, which is important these days when people are working remotely during COVID."
"Fortinet FortiGate is user-friendly and affordable."
"What I like the most is the configuration and that it's simple, and straightforward to maintain."
"The IPsec tunnels are very easily created, and quite interoperable with devices from other vendors."
"Firewalls help us a lot in controlling traffic on our network and preventing unauthorized access."
"It provides visibility and drives organizational security."
"The databases and its signatures are its most important features."
"We can create a domain to separate and segregate some functions, some services."
"The UTM platform has been the most valuable."
"The filtering was very good."
"The solution is very robust."
"It safeguards against cyber attacks."
"One of the advantages of pfSense is that it is very easy to work with. It is a very good open-source solution, and it works really well. pfSense provides a complete package. For some features, it could be the first solution in the world. It is a very good alternative in the market for a firewall solution. You don't need to go to Cisco or other brands with expensive firewalls. pfSense also allows us to offer some support services."
"At our peak time, we have reached more than 5,000 concurrent connections."
"I can manage it easily by myself."
"The firewall sensor is highly effective, and it's easy to deploy. You can deploy pfSense with limited hardware resources. It's not necessary to have an appliance with much RAM to make it work. It's cost-effective and performs well."
"Open source and support are valuable. I have community support."
"A free firewall that is a good network security appliance."
"pfSense is a nice product, and I find that there's a lot of information out there. There are some good tutorials on YouTube and other websites with helpful information."
"Is good at blocking IP addresses."
"WAN load-balancing could be a lot better at detecting when a link is poor or inconsistent, and not just flat out dead."
"The biggest "gotcha" is that if the client purchases what they call the UTM shared bundle, which has unified threat management on both, it's not as easy to manage if you have more than one firewall."
"Cisco Meraki products are rising very quickly in the cloud and the connected era. Meraki products offer much better ROI, upgradability, and manageability."
"Technical support needs to be improved."
"The user interface could be improved to make it less confusing and easier to set up."
"I haven't had a single issue since using Fortinet."
"As far as wanting more scalability or things in the network diagram, it's going to cost you."
"The solution could be more evenly structured."
"Technical support was very bad because the supplier who sold it to us, wasn't very supportive, and he wouldn't giving us direct links to the OEM."
"What has been the issue of firewalls is they ask me for policies and content filtering application control and all these features that are now part of Harmony."
"The interface needs improvement."
"Some features that could be improved are advanced threat protection, sandboxing, and vulnerability management."
"I am not able to see a demo."
"Specifically on the user experience, sometimes the set up of things, such as the VPN SSL, takes a lot of time to load and a lot of time to get up and running on every session."
"While the technical support is good, the Indian level technical support could use an upgrade."
"The solution could be improved if there was a better way to report. The reporting functionality is not really good. Even though it's not the major function. Maybe adding a way to make a custom report."
"The interface is not very shiny and attractive."
"Netgate pfSense needs to improve the configuration for a VPN."
"One concern I have with Netgate pfSense is related to packet filtering. Specifically, issues can arise with certain functionalities like GP, and, at times, there may be bugs."
"It needs better parsing of logs. At the moment, you have to use an external server for this if you want a deeper analysis."
"I'd like to find something in pfSense that is more specific to URL filtering. We have customers who would like to filter their web traffic. They would like to be able to say to their employees, "You can surf the web, but you cannot get access to Facebook or other social media," or "You can surf the web, but you're not allowed to gamble or watch porn on the web." My technicians say that doing this kind of stuff with pfSense nowadays is not easy. They can implement some filters using IP addresses but not by using the names of the domains and categories. So, we are not able to exclude some categories from the allowed traffic, such as porn, gambling, etc. To do that, we have to use another product and another web filter that uses DNS. I know that there are some third-party products that could work with pfSense, but I'd like the native pfSense solution to do that."
"We have not had any problems with it, and we also do not have a need for any new features. If anything, its reporting can be better. Sophos has better reporting than pfSense. Sophos has more detailed information. pfSense is not as detailed. It is summarized."
"We would like to see ready-made profiles to cover most users' needs."
"The main problem with pfSense is that it lacks adequate ransomware protection."
Earn 20 points
Check Point UTM-1 [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in Firewalls with 19 reviews while Netgate pfSense is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 128 reviews. Check Point UTM-1 [EOL] is rated 8.2, while Netgate pfSense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Check Point UTM-1 [EOL] writes "Great firewalls, VPN, and Intrusion prevention capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Netgate pfSense writes "User-friendly, easy to manage the firewall, rule-wise and interface-wise". Check Point UTM-1 [EOL] is most compared with , whereas Netgate pfSense is most compared with OPNsense, Sophos XG, Sophos UTM, KerioControl and Cisco Secure Firewall.
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